After December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which selected ten sites in which to imprison more than 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, over half of whom were American citizens. Two of these camps were in the Arkansas Delta, one at Rohwer in Desha County, and the other at Jerome in sections of Chicot and Drew counties. Over 16,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in these two camps between October 1942 and November 1945.

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